Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; BellocqŐs Ophelia, named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work, selected by Rita Dove for the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She received the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry. Currently, she is Professor of English and Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. (28 minutes)

At nearly 90 years old, Richard Moore is the last of the legendary San Francisco Renaissance poets. Arriving in 1934, he was among the many ŽmigrŽs to California during the Great Depression. His debut collection Writing the Silences marks his reemergence into today's literary world.

Former Poet Laureate of the United States, Hass is a UC Berkeley professor who has made important contributions in poetry, criticism, and translation. His books of poetry are Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, the latter winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. His critical essays are assembled in Twentieth Century Pleasures, and the poets he has translated include Czeslaw Milosz, Tomas Transtršmer, and masters of Japanese haiku. (46 minutes)

Born in San Francisco, Robert Haas is a California poet but his poetry, translations, and essays reveal an intimacy that transcends the borders of states and nations. With his direct clarity and promotion of literacy in "places where poets donŐt go," he served two years as U. S. Poet Laureate (1995-97). His numerous books include "Sun Under Wood," "Time and Materials," and "The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems." HassŐs numerous accolades include the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, two National Book Critics' Circle Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Hass has translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz. (51 minutes)

Robin Blaser emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and Ô50s along with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and later established himself as one of CanadaŐs foremost experimental poets. In addition to numerous works of poetry, criticism, and translation, Blaser has also penned an English and Latin opera libretto entitled The Last Supper in collaboration with Sir Harrison Birtwistle. (49 minutes)

Winners of the Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang prizes, as well as students nominated by BerkeleyŐs creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications read their work. ( minutes)

"There's love and sadness at the root of those Poems. There is also a bridge, a language that reads," writes Yusef Komunyakaa who selected Kim for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award for her debut collection of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country. Garrett Hongo writes of the collection, "Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new Poems move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea political geography...what voice, what witness, what glorious descendancy." Formerly a Stegner fellow and Fulbright scholar, Kim now resides in New York State. (28 minutes)

In 1667, John Milton published what he intended both as the crowning achievement of a poetic career and a justification of God’s ways to man: an epic poem which retold and reimagined the Biblical story of creation, temptation, and original sin. Even in a hostile political climate, Paradise Lost was almost immediately recognized as a classic, and one fate of a classic is to be rewritten, both by admirers and by antagonists. In this seminar, we will read Paradise Lost alongside works of 20th century fantasy and science fiction which rethink both Milton’s text and its source.
Students should come to the seminar having read Paradise Lost straight through at least once; this can be accomplished by taking the IAP subject, Reading Paradise Lost (21L.995), or independently. Twentieth century authors will include C. S. Lewis (Perelandra, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), as well as assorted criticism. Each week, one class meeting will focus on Milton, and the other on one of the modern novels.

What does the Genesis story of creation and temptation tell us about gender, about heterosexuality, and about the origins of evil? What is the nature of God, and how can we account for that nature in a cosmos where evil exists? When is rebellion justified, and when is authority legitimate? These are some of the key questions that engaged the poet John Milton, and that continue to engage readers of his work.

This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.

This subject follows a course of readings in lyric poetry in the English language, tracing the main lines of descent through literary periods from the Renaissance to the modern period and concentrating mostly on English rather than American examples.

Students compare the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald with the song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," then create their own poetry about a historical event.

Archeology offers the most tangible evidence of earlier civilizations. Although archeology has already provided invaluable information pertaining to the life styles and skills of the peoples from this region of West Africa, the archaeological record is still incomplete. The figurative sculptures featured in this resource furnish one part of the historical puzzle of this region. These handsome terracotta sculptures are from the Inland Niger Delta region near Djenne (pronounced JEH-nay; also spelled Jenne), one of several important trading cities that grew and developed during the Mali Empire.

Students analyze the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "We Real Cool" and then write about how the character's pool hall days might influence who the character becomes fifty years in the future.

This resource provides a variety of information and activities that teachers may like to use with their students to explore the Islamic Middle East collections at the V&A. It can be used to support learning in Maths and Art. Included in this resource are sections on:

Principles of Islamic art and design
Pre-visit activities
Activities to do in the museum
Activities to do back at school
Islamic art explores the geometric systems that depend upon the regular division of the circle and the study of Islamic art increases appreciation and understanding of geometry. The use of these geometric systems creates a harmony among Islamic decorative arts and architecture, which is consistent with the Islamic belief that all creation is harmoniously interrelated.

Approaching an abstract subject in a concrete way provides a means of extending maths into other curriculum areas. The context of the Museum expands and enriches students' appreciation of the application of geometry in a cultural context and develops the sense of different cultural identities. Students have the opportunity to become familiar with the relationship between geometry and design and this can give confidence to students who have never seen themselves as 'good at art'.

A study of Milton's poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.

Explore reading strategies using Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and other works. Students read Poe's works in both large- and small-group readings then conclude with a variety of projects.

This course considers some of the substantial early twentieth-century poetic voices in America. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound.
We’ll read the major poems by the most important poets in English in the 20th century, emphazinig especially the period between post-WWI disillusionment and early WW II internationalism (ca. 1918-1940). Our special focus this term will be how the concept of “the Image” evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century, early 20th century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin films.
We’ll read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet-as-language-priest, aesthetic-experience-as-displaced-religious impulse, to poetry as faith, ritual, and form.

This course covers the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.

June 1841, from Robert Merry’s Museum

Robert Merry’s Museum children’s magazine (1841-1872) featured works by nearly every 19th century children’s writer. It also excerpted works for adults. Pat Pflieger has indexed several works from the magazine online, and notes that “The Moon”, as a piece, “wanders from lyricism to science to speculation as it explores the effects of the moon on earth, and, evidently, on the human imagination”.